


stumble in my footsteps

by glorious_spoon



Category: Iron Fist (TV)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Blackmail, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Incest, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-11
Updated: 2020-04-11
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:54:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23597176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glorious_spoon/pseuds/glorious_spoon
Summary: They’re in Seoul when the video uploads to their shared dropbox.
Relationships: Harold Meachum/Ward Meachum, Ward Meachum & Danny Rand
Comments: 14
Kudos: 43
Collections: Hurt Comfort Exchange 2020





	stumble in my footsteps

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scioscribe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/gifts).



> This is a treat fic for **scioscribe** , for the prompts _bleak back-story of Harold/Ward noncon_ and _video of character's rape is sent to their friends/loved ones_.
> 
> The rape happens prior to the story and isn't explicit, but that's the context for what's going on in this fic, so please read (or don't) with that in mind.

They’re in Seoul when the video uploads to their shared dropbox. Ward is out, allegedly picking up something to eat but in reality probably avoiding both Danny and the tiny hotel room they’ve been stuck in for three weeks while they stake out a shipping company controlled by the local _jopok_ , one more link in the chain that will—eventually, hopefully—lead back to Orson Randall _._

The notification pops up with an annoying little electronic burble, and Danny flops onto the bed, pulling the laptop toward him. One of their informants must have come up with something. If he's lucky, it’ll be something they can actually use instead of another dead end, and maybe they can get out of this damn hotel room before he loses his patience completely and throws either Ward or himself off the sleekly modern glass-and-steel ninth-floor balcony.

He doesn’t recognize the account, but the message is addressed to Ward by name. Which is... weird. It was Ward's idea to use fake names in the first place, citing operational security and what he calls Danny's hopelessly optimistic take on human nature. The odds of him giving out his real name to some sketchy informant, or anyone else for that matter, are pretty low. 

_Mr. Meachum,_ it reads. _Our operation has some outstanding business with Rand Enterprises that we hope to discuss with you. Please respond within 48 hours. If you do not, the attached materials and others like them will be made public._

There’s no signature, but there is a video attachment. Danny leans forward, frowning.

Not an informant, then.

His first thought is that Ward definitely has people on retainer to deal with exactly this kind of thing. But the video clip shows a thumbnail of Harold's penthouse, and Danny has never been sure exactly how much Ward actually _told_ anybody about that. He taps on the video, which glitches briefly before expanding to fill the small screen. It occurs to him an instant later it might be a virus, and also that if he crashes Ward’s laptop he’ll never hear the end of it.

There are no more glitches, though. Just a camera angled at the couch that Danny remembers waking up on after Ward shoved him out the window, above and slightly to the left. Ward is sitting, suit-clad and stiff, while Harold paces around him. The date stamp in the corner is from September of 2016. There’s no audio.

On the screen, Harold stops talking and kneels down to put his hand on Ward’s face, stroking his cheek, and Ward—recoils. He pushes away, surging up to his feet before Harold pulls him back down with visible force. He grips a handful of Ward's hair, yanking his head back and leaning forward to murmur something in his ear. Whatever it is makes Ward flinch hard and then go abruptly still.

Unease twists coldly in the pit of Danny's stomach. It’s not the flurry of savage violence that he was expecting and fearing, but that makes it worse, somehow. The bleak misery on Ward’s face as Harold curls over him like a ravening beast, greedy and grasping. His mouth at Ward’s exposed throat as if he means to devour him alive. His hands drop between them to undo his belt and pull it loose. It slithers to the carpet as he shoves his pants down and starts yanking at Ward's clothing.

With a sickening lurch like a joint dislocating, Danny understands what he's watching. He wishes—fiercely, with a sudden wild anger that he thought he'd long-since buried—that Ward would shove away or hit back or take up the expensive sculpture on the sideboard and smash it across Harold’s face in a spray of blood and bone the way Danny wishes he could right now, years later and uselessly distant.

That doesn’t happen, of course. Instead Ward turns his face toward the couch as Harold moves between him and the camera, a chiaroscuro nightmare of pale bare flesh and rumpled dark clothing, and Danny leans forward to turn it off before he can see any more. His hands are shaking. He curls them into fists, almost expecting to see his knuckles glowing with a surge of power to match his fury, but they’re just bone and flesh, pale and useless.

Distantly, he remembers Ward reciting a story that he said he got from Yang, about a shepherd in a long-ago village who made a deal with the Hand and lost his soul in the process, descending bit by bit into depravity. About a father roasting his own children over a fire.

 _“They destroy the people closest to them,”_ Ward said, and Danny still remembers the bitter edge to his laughter. At the time, he thought he understood. _“Explains Dad, I guess.”_

There are footsteps in the hallway outside. He breathes in and drops his hands, trying to get himself under control as the lock _beeps_ softly and releases.

Ward is already talking as he pushes the door open with his elbow, his hands occupied with takeout boxes. “Okay, I got that kimchi ramen you like on the condition that you eat it outside where I don’t have to smell it, and I stopped in to talk to Chun-hei, she said that she’ll have the shipping manifests for us by…” he trails off when he meets Danny’s eyes. “What?”

There’s a mild sunburn across the bridge of his nose, and his hair is shoved haphazardly behind his ears and needs a trim. He looks calm and relaxed. Soft, in a way that Danny couldn’t have imagined when he first came back to New York, and it’s that, somehow, that makes bile rise in his throat.

Something must show on his face, because Ward straightens, setting the boxes down, and there’s a hint of the old brittle frost in his voice when he repeats, “ _What._ ”

“I—” Danny shakes his head and shoves himself back as Ward crosses the room. He wants to slam the laptop shut, but he doesn’t. Ward needs to know. “There was a video uploaded to the dropbox—I didn’t think, I just—”

“Danny,” Ward says warningly.

“I’m sorry,” Danny says. The words ring hollow, wholly inadequate. “I didn’t know.”

Ward peers over his shoulder, reads the brief note, and goes very still. “Play it.”

Danny hesitates. Before he can think of a way to just— _stop_ this—Ward makes an impatient noise and reaches over his shoulder to press play.

Danny turns his head as the video starts, because he can’t watch this a second time. Not that watching Ward watch it is actually any better. Nothing has even happened yet. It’s just Harold pacing, gesticulating—but there’s that moment, then, when he suddenly stops, and kneels down beside the couch where Ward is sitting like a statue, and cups a hand tenderly to his face.

In the present day, Ward blanches. A moment later he straightens and steps back, moving like a marionette. His face has drained of color, skin gone white around his mouth.

“Excuse me,” he says with stiff, distant politeness, and crosses the tiny room in two long strides. The bathroom door slams shut behind him, the lock clicking hard. A moment later, water splashes in the sink, but it's not enough to cover the sound of retching.

The video is still playing. Danny turns it off, slams the laptop shut, and manages to resist driving his fist through the fragile machine only by swinging for the brick wall instead.

* * *

He’s almost done wrapping his split knuckles by the time Ward emerges from the bathroom. He pauses inside the doorway, eyes Danny, then says, “What the hell happened to your hand?”

“Punched a wall,” Danny says succinctly, looking up. Ward is still pale, his hair damp like he was splashing water on his face. His eyes are red. He looks relatively composed, but there's a brittleness to it, like any wrong move might shatter him. It would be helpful if Danny had any idea at all what the right move is here. Ward isn't giving anything away. “Are you okay?”

“I thought they taught you how to punch through walls in K'un Lun.”

“They did.” Danny drops his hands in his lap, the injured over the whole. “Lei Kung would have said that sloppy form is its own punishment. And then had me do another fifty repetitions.”

“Nice to know we both had such well-adjusted upbringings,” Ward mutters. He’s got his elbows folded against his body, hands tucked under. It’s the posture of someone who expects to be hit and isn’t planning to defend himself. Danny aches to go straighten his shoulders and loosen his arms and show him how to bring his fists up in a defensive stance. Or maybe just hug him. He doesn’t do either.

Ward clears his throat, then says, without looking at Danny, “You watched it.”

“Not all of it. I turned it off as soon as I realized...”

“What was going on,” Ward finishes with a dry huff of something that definitely isn’t laughter. “Yeah.”

Danny starts to open his mouth, and Ward lifts a hand in a sharply negating gesture, then tucks it back against his body. “Where did it originate? I thought I’d found all of the…” He stops, then says, “He must have had them backed up somewhere.”

The implications of that are horrifying in ways that Danny can’t even begin to contemplate right now. Since it’s what Ward seems to want, he focuses on the practicalities instead. “I don’t know for sure. I think it must have been one of the subsidiaries that the Hand was using in New York. The address was from the States.”

“That narrows it down to about three hundred different possibilities.” Ward drags a hand over his mouth, then nods sharply. “Okay. You should give Chun-hei a call. She can give you the rest of the intel on the shipment. I’ll handle this.”

“Ward—”

“I’ll _handle_ it, Danny,” Ward snaps, pulling out his phone as he steps out onto the balcony. The sliding glass door slams shut behind him, leaving Danny alone in a room that still smells of kimchi and gochujang with an aching hand and eyes that are burning and dry.

* * *

He calls Chun-hei. She’s a bored intake clerk at the local shipping yard who’s been working with them mostly because she has a thing for Ward that Ward is either oblivious to or ignoring—it’s hard to tell with him. Danny manages to stumble through ten minutes of conversation about transport schedules, scribbling down everything she tells him on the back of a takeout menu and retaining pretty much none of it.

“Your handsome friend was here earlier,” she says at the end of it, and he can hear the smile in her voice. “You’ll tell him he can still come see me after this, yeah?”

“Yeah, sure, of course,” Danny says, and ends the call without any of his usual teasing. He tosses the phone on the bed, next to the laptop that he still sort of wants to throw at the wall, as if it’s the hapless machine’s fault that that video exists, that what’s in it happened in the first place, that Danny watched it when Ward obviously didn’t want him to know.

Outside on the balcony, Ward is pacing with his phone pressed to his ear, punctuating whatever he’s saying with sharp, impatient gestures. Danny wants to go outside and try to make him eat something, or wrap him into a hug, or apologize, or—something—but he knows none of that would be welcome right now. He should probably count himself lucky that Ward hasn’t gone any farther than the hotel balcony, even though the glass door feels like a brick wall between them.

He ends up sitting on the bed and trying to meditate as night falls around him and shadows stretch from the edges of the room, trying to calm the sickening, useless churn of grief and anger in the pit of his stomach. It doesn’t really work, and he's still disoriented and out of sorts when he surfaces some time later to the sound of the balcony door sliding open. Ward steps back into the room, pausing just inside. The animation he had on the phone earlier is gone. His expression is a shadowed and unreadable mask.

“Hey,” he says. “You’re still here.”

“Of course,” Danny says quietly. He can’t bring himself to react to the implication that Ward thought maybe he _wouldn’t_ be. “Did you find anything?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. The file came from a holding company that Rand bought out back when—it doesn’t matter. Point is, it should have been dispersed years ago, but clearly that wasn’t the case. I’ll fly back to New York tomorrow and make some inquiries in person.” Ward shrugs tightly and offers Danny a chilly, humorless smile, a slice of white in the gloom. “Or just pay them off, if it comes to that. Perks of being rich.”

“Okay. I’ll come with you.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Ward says impatiently. “If you miss the next shipment here, who knows how long it’ll be before—”

“ _Ward,_ ” Danny interrupts. The idea of Ward trying to deal with this all alone is unbearable. He knows that if Ward had been the one to see that damn video first, he would have found a way to ditch Danny and do exactly that, but that just makes it worse. “I don’t care about the damn shipment. Okay? Just—let me help. Please.”

Ward hesitates for a long time, then nods jerkily and reaches for the containers he abandoned on the side table earlier. “Fine. Katie will have a flight ready by morning. Did you eat anything yet?”

Without waiting for Danny to respond, he tosses one of the boxes to him. Danny catches it one-handed without looking, and wishes desperately that Ward would make some kind of snide, teasing remark about kung fu ninja show-offs. Instead, he takes the other container and goes to sit on his own bed without a word.

Dinner is an awkward and silent affair of cold takeout. Danny forces himself to choke down most of a container of gluey ramen; Ward picks at his before pitching it in the garbage and going to brush his teeth. When he comes out, he collapses into his bed fully clothed, then pulls the covers over himself.

Danny moves through his bedtime routine quietly without turning the lights on. He brushes his teeth and changes into his pajamas and sets his phone on the charger. After a bit of hunting, he locates Ward’s phone on top of the TV stand and puts that on to charge as well. Ward is a still, silent shape in the other bed, which means he’s definitely still awake. He thrashes in his sleep, as Danny’s shins and sundry other parts can attest after every time they’ve had to share a bed (or a tent, or a stuffy attic compartment, or a blanket in the back of a shipping container) in the past few months.

Danny sits down on his bed and pulls his feet up under him, composing and discarding a dozen different conversational offerings before finally giving up. He’s not good at subtlety, never has been. Right now Ward will probably see any attempt at it as a trap anyway. “Hey. Ward.”

Ward takes long enough to answer that Danny wonders if he’s fallen asleep after all. Finally, warily, he says, “Yeah, what?”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“What do you think?”

“Yeah,” Danny sighs. What was he expecting? “Sorry. Stupid question.”

“Yeah, it was.” Ward sounds more distant than angry, though. Danny can see his profile facing toward the ceiling, his eyes reflecting the faint light. It’s impossible to tell what he’s thinking, but a moment later, he says, “I didn't want anyone to know.”

The subtext is clear: _including you._

"I'm sorry."

"Jesus, Danny. Don't be sorry, just keep it to yourself."

“Okay,” Danny murmurs. The fact that he can’t actually see Ward’s expression makes it easier to add, “But—look, you know it wasn’t your fault, right?”

That’s the thing that he keeps circling back to. The worst thing about it, in some ways. It’s not like there’s any shortage of potential blackmail material stemming from various things that actually were Ward’s fault, and anyone who knows about that video probably knows about those as well. That they chose _this_ instead is just… cruel. Perversely, pointlessly cruel in the way that the Hand so often is. In the way that Harold was.

“Of course I know that.” There’s a bitter undercurrent to Ward’s voice that gives lie to the words. “It’s the optics I’m concerned about.”

“The _optics?_ ” Danny says incredulously, before he can stop himself.

"I wasn't a kid. People will say that I should have—fought back. Put a stop to it. That maybe the reason I didn’t was because some sick part of me..."

Ward stops, but Danny can hear the end of the sentence as clearly as if he said it out loud. _Because some sick part of me liked it. Wanted it._ He winces. "I don't think that."

"Yeah, well, most people aren't you." The silence draws out before Ward takes a breath and says, in calm, measured tones like he’s giving a deposition, “I keep thinking. After all this shit with the local criminal syndicate, I probably speak enough Korean to go find some… shitty bar and score a hit of something. Even if I didn’t, there’s enough booze in the minibar here to get me so trashed I can’t remember my own name, let alone all this.”

Danny closes his eyes. Somehow, he didn’t even think of that. “You didn’t, though.”

“No. Go me. I get to keep my sobriety chip, for whatever the hell that’s worth. Bethany would be so proud. At least, she would be if she were still speaking to me, which she’s not, because I fucked that up just like I fuck up everything else.”

“ _I’m_ proud of you,” Danny says, quick and raw. It sounds condescending the moment the words leave his mouth, like he has any right to cast judgment one way or another, but Ward just laughs softly. It’s not really a happy sound, but it’s a little less horribly numb than everything else that’s come out of his mouth since this afternoon.

“Thanks,” he says. For a while, there’s just the sound of both their breathing, and then he adds, abruptly, “I’m sorry you saw that.”

 _Me too_ , Danny thinks, but doesn’t say. He is sorry he saw it. He’s a lot sorrier that Ward lived through it. He doesn’t say that, either. It’s the truth, but he doesn’t really think it would help right now.

“We’ll find whoever’s behind this, and we’ll burn their entire operation to the ground,” he offers instead. That’s not just the truth; it’s a promise, and it’s one he’ll make good on if he has to take half of NYC down to its foundations in the process.

“We will, huh?” Ward asks dryly, shifting in his bed until he’s facing Danny, his face a maze of shadows. Over his shoulder, through the window, Seoul is spread out in a blanket of glimmering light. Danny thinks about all of the things that have broken between them over the years, imperfectly mended, and how easy it would have been for Ward to climb into a bottle tonight and never climb back out.

He thinks of how goddamn glad he is that Harold is dead, and that Ward is still here.

“Yeah,” he says out loud. “We will.”


End file.
